French Antisemitic Comedian Running for European Parliament

Twenty candidates for the French Anti-Zionist Party met to launch their campaign for the European Parliament elections scheduled for June 7th. The meeting was held at Theatre de le Main d’Or (Gold Hand Theater), a private performance hall located in an Arab section of Paris and owned by the head of the party, antisemitic comedian Mbala Mbala Dieudonne. Dieudonne presented them one by one, surveying each candidate’s record of anti-Zionist endeavors to a cheering audience and reporters. The party list for the Paris region includes a lineup of antisemitic activists from the Left and the extreme Right who are willing to have their names appear together on a list against what they dub “the Zionist takeover of France.”Writer Alain Soral, who started in the Communist Party, passed through Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right National Front Party and eventually made his way to the new party list, lashed out at the reporters as “little Zionist collaborators.” The candidates include Maria Poumier, a university lecturer who serves as a representative for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and who wrapped herself in a Venezuelan flag. Tenth on the list is Christine Coutanne, a psychologist who claimed “the Zionists are behind the manipulation of Mexican swine flu.”

The Iranian media sent a special team of photographers to cover the event. “Christians are foreigners in their own home. Palestinians and Christians in France, wake up!” called the number-three candidate on the list, Yechiya Gustami. Dieudonne and his candidates are becoming more and more isolated and denounced in France, and will try to draw the votes of young Arabs from the suburbs if they manage to survive until the elections.

The French government is still searching for legal grounds to ban the party from the election list.